Chappie

Whether Crappie director Neill Blomkamp knew it or not, it was high time for a Short Circuit reboot. It had been far too long since a goofy white guy with a mullet like Steve Guttenberg’s taught a robot how to dance. Plus who doesn’t love a movie about a talking robot? There are far too many teenagers out there who don’t know anything about Johnny 5 or his quest to be alive and what’s even sadder is the fact that they don’t know about the power of the mullet.  Why did we all of a sudden abandon the idea that our heroes could have such awesome hair fashion? It didn’t matter if it was a muscular Jean Claude van Damme or a gangly and sensitive Guttenburg, the power rested in the locks and it made them invincible, just like Sampson.

Even Black heroes had fresh hair back in the day; just look at Billie Dee Williams’ perm in Empire Strikes Back, Apollo Creed’s short Jeri curl in Rocky, or even Wesley Snipes’ box cut in Blade. I spent countless hours in the beauty chair trying to get my hair to look like Apollo’s just so I could do fresh dances like he did while wearing short gold shorts. When you grow up in small town Texas, you don’t really have a lot of role models and you have a ton of time on your hands.

But I will say that Blomkamp does have a love for robots and thanks to the success of District 9, he can make movies about them for the rest of his career. He made a few mistakes with his second film Elysium but it looks as though he learned from that and came back strong with his latest sci-fi epic Chappie.

Chappie takes place in Johannesburg, South Africa, a place where crime has become so rampant that the government relies upon robots to police their citizens. These robots are big, agile, and deadly, but more importantly they are controlled by computer software. The company that makes the robots is obviously flourishing but there is a competition that exists between their two main engineers which eventually leads to disaster.

Deon (Dev Patel) dreams of being able to create an AI robot that is able to reason, dream, and think like humans do; and due to his persistence and ingenuity, he eventually becomes successful in building a prototype in Chappie. His rival Vincent (Hugh Jackman) has designs on selling his giant military grade robot which is controlled by humans to the police force. Neither of their ideas are exactly greeted with open arms but that doesn’t stop either one of them from trying to get their creations out in the open. And it’s when they do, that all hell breaks loose.

Blomkamp is known for his social commentary in his movies and this one is no different. While some of the exchanges between Chappie and his parents, Die Antwoord, might lose some people; it’s the perfect statement on how we as humans can screw up a beautiful creation that would otherwise be used for good or our advancement with our stupidity and misguidance. And yes, you read that correctly, Die Antwoord is in this movie. Blomkamp loves them and he decided to cast them as two of his main villains. They actually do a solid job playing underground criminals and if you like their music, it’s all over this movie.

And speaking of music, Hans Zimmer’s score takes the action in this movie to a whole new level. By the time they were breaking out gravity bombs and rocket launchers, I almost stood up in the theater and cheered. This is seriously the best action Blomkampt’s had in any of his movies.

But what really makes this movie work is Sharito Copley providing the voice and personality for Chappie. He plays the wide eyed and naïve Chappie to perfection and he makes you truly feel like he’s more human than robot. So there are some pretty gut wrenching scenes as Chappie learns the harshness of the real world.

Like I said, some of the funny exchanges that happen between him and Antwoord might take some people completely out of the movie but for die hard sci-fi fans you will absolutely love it. It’s both a heart breaking and exhilarating movie and I suggest you check it out. This is as close as you can get to a rating of tight without actually making it, so I give it a rating of unbelievably FRESH!